Tiger Stadium, popularly known as Death Valley, is an outdoor stadium located in Baton Rouge, Louisiana on the campus of Louisiana State University. It is the home stadium of the LSU Tigers football team. Prior to 1924, LSU played its home games at State Field, located on the old LSU campus in Downtown Baton Rouge. Tiger Stadium opened with a capacity of 12,000 in 1924. Renovations and expansions have brought the stadium's current capacity to 102,321, making it the third largest stadium in the Southeastern Conference, fifth largest stadium in the NCAA and the sixth largest stadium in the world. Tiger Stadium is well known nationally for having among the best game day atmospheres in college football as well as being one of the most difficult places for an opposing team to play. Despite being 14–2 at Tiger Stadium, famed Alabama head coach Bear Bryant once remarked that "Baton Rouge happens to be the worst place in the world for a visiting team. It's like being inside a drum." In 2001, ESPN sideline reporter Adrian Karsten said, "Death Valley in Baton Rouge is the loudest stadium I've been in."

In 2002, coach Terry Hoeppner said of Tiger Stadium, "That's as exciting an environment as you can have... we had communication problems we haven't had at Michigan and Ohio State." In 2003, ESPN's Chris Fowler called LSU his favorite game day experience. In 2009 former Arkansas GovernorMike Huckabee stated on Sean Hannity's Fox News show that "Unfair is playing LSU on a Saturday night in Baton Rouge." Survey after survey has concluded that Tiger Stadium is the most difficult place for a visiting team to play, including surveys by the College Football Association in 1987, The Sporting News in 1989, Gannett News Service in 1995, Sport Magazine in 1998. More in 2007, ESPN named Tiger Stadium "the scariest place to play", saying that "Tiger Stadium is, by far, the loudest stadium in the country."In 2009, ESPN writer Chris Low listed Tiger Stadium's Saturday night atmosphere as unsurpassed in the country, ranking it No. 1 out of the SE conference's 12 stadiums. In 2016, Tiger Stadium was again ranked No. 1 out of the conference's 14 stadiums by USA Today writers Laken Litman & Steven Ruiz.

LSU prefers night games in Tiger Stadium with its opponents, but television coverage requires that many contests be played in the afternoons. The university is conflicted between maximizing its potential to win and needed advertising revenues from television coverage; as explained by Chet Hilburn in The Mystique of Tiger Stadium: 25 Greatest Games: The Ascension of LSU Football, "The Tigers are apt to win more games at night in Tiger Stadium but the university takes in much more revenue for a day game televised by CBS because of the Southeastern Conference contract with the network is so lucrative."In 2008, as Alabama narrowly defeated LSU, Wright Thompson of ESPN.com described Tiger Stadium as "the best place in the world to watch a sporting event."In 2013, the NCAA ranked Tiger Stadium as the loudest stadium in all of college football. In 2014, the No. 3-ranked Ole Miss Rebels played the No. 24-ranked LSU Tigers on October 25. After the Tigers held the Rebels to only 7 points in a 10–7 victory, Ole Miss quarterbackBo Wallace stated, "It's a crazy atmosphere.

This is the craziest place I've played." With an official seating capacity of 102,321, Tiger Stadium is the sixth-largest stadium in the world by capacity. It is the fifth-largest stadium in the NCAA and the third-largest in the Southeastern Conference, behind Kyle Field at Texas A&M University and Neyland Stadium at Tennessee and larger than Bryant-Denny Stadium at Alabama; the stadium opened in 1924 and seated 12,000—the lower half of the current facility's grandstands on the east and west sidelines. In 1931, 10,000 seats were added to the existing grandstands. In 1936 capacity was more than doubled with 24,000 seats in the north end zone, turning the stadium into a horseshoe. Money was not allocated in the state budget for the seating expansion, but money was allocated for dormitories. According to local legend, Governor Huey P. Long, who had always taken a personal interest in LSU, ordered that dormitories be built in the stadium, with seating above the student living quarters. However, in a 2015 ESPN story, Bud Johnson, at the time director of LSU's athletics museum and a former LSU sports information director, said that the idea came from LSU's athletic director T. P.

"Skipper" Heard, while "the governor helped in other ways." Until the late 1980s, the West and South Stadium dormitories were featured as part of student housing at LSU, the football team lived in them during the 1986 season while the athletic dormitory was being renovated. The dormitories were converted to office space for Athletic Department staff and faculty and studios for the College of Art & Design's Fine Arts graduate students, but by 2015 were no longer used. More than 21,000 seats were added in the south end zone in 1953, turning the stadium into a 67,720-seat bowl, making Tiger Stadium the largest on-campus stadium in the SEC, a distinction it would hold until Neyland Stadium expanded to 80,250 in 1976. Unlike the existing stadium structure, they were double-decked in order to fit within the space provided; the first of the two upper decks was added to the west side of the stadium in 1978 to bring capacity to 78,000. The stadium was upgraded multiple times in the 1980s beginning with replacement of bench seats with chair back seats and waterproofing of the east and west stands in 1985.

The playing surface was moved 11 feet to the south to center the field in 1986. The north and south ends of the stadium were waterproofed and chair back seats added in 1987 to bring those sections up to date with the 1985 impr

Jacques Jean Edmond Georges Gaillot. He was Bishop of Évreux in France from 1982 to 1995. In 1995, Pope John Paul II removed him as head of his diocese because he publicly expressed controversial and heterodox positions on religious and social matters; these views earned him the popular nickname of The Red Cleric. Jacques Gaillot was born in Saint-Dizier, Haute-Marne, on 11 September 1935, he decided to become a priest. After his secondary studies, he entered the seminary in Langres. From 1957 to 1959, he performed his compulsory military service in Algeria during the war of independence. In Rome from 1960 to 1962 he earned his bachelor's degree, he was ordained a priest in 1961. From 1962 to 1964, he studied at the Higher Institute for Liturgy in Paris and taught at the major seminary in Châlons-en-Champagne. Beginning in 1965, he was a professor at the regional seminary of Reims, he chaired many sessions to implement the principles and policies established in the documents produced by the Second Vatican Council.

In 1973, he was assigned to the parish of St Dizier in his home town and became co-manager of the institute for the training of seminary instructors in Paris. In 1977, he was appointed vicar general of the Diocese of Langres. In 1981, he was elected vicar capitular. On 5 May 1982, Pope John Paul II appointed him Bishop of Évreux, he received his episcopal consecration on 20 June from Bishop of Langres. During his first Easter message he wrote: "Christ died outside the walls as he was born outside the walls. If we are to see the light, the sun, of Easter, we ourselves must go outside the walls." Following this he stated that: "I'm not here to convince the convinced or take care of the well. I'm here to offer a hand to the lost. Does a bishop remain in his cathedral or does he go into the street?... I made my choice." Within months Gaillot had begun to act on his word. In 1983, he supported a conscientious objector in Évreux who declined to perform alternative service in forestry because it did not contribute to relief of the destitute or promoting peace.

During the yearly assembly of the episcopate, he was one of the two bishops voting against the episcopate's text on nuclear deterrence, which supported having nuclear arms as a legitimate deterrent. In 1984 he angered numerous Catholic authorities by refusing to support the movement in defence of French parochial schools. In 1985, he supported the First Intifada in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and met Yasser Arafat in Tunis, being embraced by the future Nobel Peace Prize Laureate in a private audience; the most notable event he performed in 1987 was attending, by invitation, a special session of the United Nations in New York to speak out for disarmament. The first amount of considerable media attention paid to Gaillot came in January 1985 when he signed an appeal on behalf of underpaid Catholic school teachers; this proved to be controversial, bringing about the start of a right-wing campaign against Bishop Gaillot. Within his own diocese, Le Figaro spearheaded the campaign. At this point Bishop Gaillot was described as being "a tool of the church's worst enemies".

In 1987, he went to South Africa to meet a young anti-apartheid militant from Évreux sentenced to four years in prison by the South African régime. There he appeared at a demonstration where some Communist militants were demonstrating. In order to accomplish this trip, he had to renounce going with the diocesan pilgrimage to Lourdes, a move that attracted criticism. Further, in the same year he announced that the French Bishops "remain too preoccupied by the correct functioning of the church and its structures." This only ensured that the responses to Gaillot when he attacked the right-wing French political party, the National Front, were stronger. In 1987 Gaillot traveled to Athens to show solidarity with a boatload of Palestinian refugees. In 1988, during a closed-door session of the assembly in Lourdes, he advocated the ordination of married men to the priesthood. After the proceedings had finished Gaillot spoke to the press about the discussions held and promoted his own viewpoints. By promoting a revision of clerical celibacy and the use of condoms, he caused considerable tension with the French bishops' conference, the situation being exacerbated by the fact that in speaking to the media about the session, Gaillot had violated convention regarding assembly conclaves.

He defended his previous actions, remarking that "I never broke the vow of celibacy... I only questioned it, but that's worse." That year, Gaillot took the unprecedented step for a Roman Catholic bishop of blessing a homosexual union in a "service of welcoming", after the couple requested it in view of their imminent death from AIDS. In 1989, Galliot participated in a trip to French Polynesia organized by the peace movement, asking for the end to French nuclear testing, he participated in the ceremony of the transfer of the ashes of the late bishop Baptiste-Henri Grégoire to the Panthéon, a necropolis for the great men of France. Grégoire had been instrumental in the first abolition of slavery, the end of discrimination against Blacks and Jews during the French Revolution; the hierarchy of the Catholic Church had refused to give him the last sacraments because of Grégoire's acceptance of the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. Gaillot was the only French bishop participating in this ceremony; the French journalist Henri Tincq wrote in Le Monde that Gaillot "h